A demonstration of the next release of Novell's Linux for desktops drew cheers and applause Wednesday, although the final version of the software is not expected for some months. Nat Friedman, the company's vice president of Linux desktop engineering, showed Novell Linux Desktop 10 playing videos and MP3 music files, and exchanging music and photos with an iPod and a digital camera, in a keynote presentation at the Solutions Linux conference and trade show on the outskirts of Paris.

1) Use of .NET as a framework for building applications is a LONG way off - look how long it took for the transition from win16 to win32, some companies were still shipping win16 applications right up until the beginning of 2000!

2) KDE already has almost every bit of the technology laid out, hence my comfusion as to why people still scream GNOME - someone NEEDS to purchase Trolltech and make Qt completely opensource under something like BSDL or CDDL, something that is nice 'n commercial friendly.

3) (Not directly bought up by you, but I'll address it anyway) Although there is WINE out there, do we really want to enter into a situation where software companies simply avoid brining native applications to Linux or UNIX in geneal because, "oh well, it works just as good on WINE" - thus opening up a rather large quagmire.

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1) Use of .NET as a framework for building applications is a LONG way off - look how long it took for the transition from win16 to win32, some companies were still shipping win16 applications right up until the beginning of 2000!
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Technology adoption is a fascinating topic. You are correct pointing out that even in 2000 people were building win16 applications in 2000. Technology adoption does not happen overnight.

The good news is that certain sectors will adopt it early. With Mono these early adopters, as well as the larger market will have a choice of running their software on Unix.

In addition to that, many of Novell's own products are being built with Mono (iFolder, Hula, F-Spot, Beagle, Casa, Banshee and a few other internal apps that we have not released yet).

The productivity boost (due to many factors) is very significant in our experience.

2) KDE already has almost every bit of the technology laid out, hence my comfusion as to why people still scream GNOME - someone NEEDS to purchase Trolltech and make Qt completely opensource under something like BSDL or CDDL, something that is nice 'n commercial friendly.

So does GNOME. All of those bits of technology are there as well.

The major bits for desktop adoption include improving OpenOffice interoperability and feature set, improving interoperability with Microsoft formats, making sure device drivers keep working across kernel versions.

Technology adoption is a fascinating topic. You are correct pointing out that even in 2000 people were building win16 applications in 2000. Technology adoption does not happen overnight.

The good news is that certain sectors will adopt it early. With Mono these early adopters, as well as the larger market will have a choice of running their software on Unix.

In addition to that, many of Novell's own products are being built with Mono (iFolder, Hula, F-Spot, Beagle, Casa, Banshee and a few other internal apps that we have not released yet).

The productivity boost (due to many factors) is very significant in our experience.

True, but they are clean, start from scratch projects - the software that customers need, are the established titles with hundreds of thousands of lines of code with millions of man hours invested into the project - as much as I would love for Adobe to jump out of their closet with pom-poms declaring that the next versions of their software will be completely .NET native, its just not going to happen.

What Mono needs right now is an IDE that doesn't suck - and I'm sure you've seen in the big bad world, corporations run on quick and dirty coding - drag, drop, assign a little code and push out to the end users and sort out the the sexiness of the code later.

The problem is, Novell doesn't have such a solution - they also don't have the marketing power required to PUSH mono; they remind me of DEC, Amiga, Atari - great technology company run by engineers who don't realise that to market something you need some razzle dazzle.

So does GNOME. All of those bits of technology are there as well.

The major bits for desktop adoption include improving OpenOffice interoperability and feature set, improving interoperability with Microsoft formats, making sure device drivers keep working across kernel versions.

Then there are people like me who avoid the rigmarole and go for Solaris and FreeBSD. Not to turn this into a Linux vs. everything else match, but I do find it rather ammusing to see that what handstrungs Linux are well known, and yet, no one actually does a damn thing to fix it.

A driver API that makes more moves in one release than Rickey Martin does with his hips in a whole song; a compiler that can't seem to work out a stable ABI and blood well stick to it; a community riddled with people who spend half their time bitching about which licence to use rather than just getting down to coding; a desktop that is split in half and there is no current solution right now to bring the two together until a unified low level architecture.

To be quite frank, its gotten to the stage where I just throw my hands up and just laugh, because there isn't much I can do about it - I can keep getting pissed off, or I'll simply avoid the issue, use a Mac, FreeBSD or Windows computer and be done with it.